Industry Updates

Sales is a numbers game

03 Sep 2014

Telesales staff have one of the toughest assignments in the sales department. They call many people on a daily basis, and more often than not, get abused for their trouble. Why do they do it? Because it works.

So says Louise Robinson, Sales Director of CG Consulting, who says as intrusive as the phone is, it is still a highly successful marketing tool. For every 10 calls you make, you can expect approximately one positive response.

She says this may not seem like much, but that is ten successes for every hundred calls made, or a hundred for every thousand. This is more than enough to keep a company in business.

According to Robinson, if you have 50 prospects on your list, maybe half of those, some 25, are worth your time. Of these, 12 will result in a conversation with the correct person, and of those 12, maybe seven will result in a proposal being submitted, and two or three will lead to an actual sale.

However, she says there are ways to raise your numbers. The first and most obvious step, is to get more projects. Small things make a big difference  if one of your sales consultants made two extra calls a day, which equals 10 a week and 40 a month, this will add up and potentially lead to four more clients. Like an athlete who pts in an extra 10 percent, the more calls the sales team can make, the fitter they will become.

The best way to do this, she says, is to buy a database from a professional database company. The most notable benefit of database marketing is that it enables businesses to use business intelligence to make decisions about who their best customers are and what their common denominators are. 

She says this already makes marketing segmentation more accurate and effective. Organisations analyse the database to find out what traits are common to customers who are purchasing specific products and services, and therefore allows the business to start to target those customers with offers they know are relevant to them.

Another benefit, she says, is improved customer relationships. Database marketing can really boost your relationships with your most important customers. Sales staff can monitor buying activity from all potential and actual sales activities.

In this way, Robinson says, customer relationships are better maintained, and up-selling opportunities created. In terms of services, CRM staff can better serve each separate client when they have information on that specific customer's history with the organisation. Once again, this enables service calls to become up-selling opportunities.

It is important to remember that sales is just a big numbers game, so the way to win is to raise those numbers. Having accurate databases of prospects is one important way to get your numbers up. And databases could prove to be your luck angel. Gary Player has said that the harder he practices, the luckier he becomes. The more calls they make, the luckier your sales team will become.

About Database 360Database 360 is a data owner and broker for emerging African and Middle East direct marketing lists. The company is a division of CG Consulting. As a result of CGs ongoing telemarketing efforts, its databases are continually updated and cleaned with the latest information regarding companies operating across the entire African continent. Database 360 owns and manages these databases and makes them available to its clients locally and internationally.

CG Consulting has a young technology direct marketing team that specialises in growing clients revenue pipelines through strategically focused lead generation campaigns. The companys core focus is profiling, gathering market intelligence and looking for opportunities in the market place. CG Consulting is a database specialist with expertise in all aspects of the industry, and specialises in appointment setting across Africa.

CG Consultings services are IT-focused, and include outbound telemarketing campaigns into the corporate market in South Africa and the entire African continent; outsourced B2B lead generation campaigns; telemarketing call downs (branding and awareness drives); qualified appointment setting campaigns with corporate clients within Southern Africa and the African continent including Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Angola and Egypt; database management and data mining; market research and profiling of corporate clients in South Africa and across Africa, as well as many others.